Malaysian street food restaurant, Satay (1711 N. 45th St.) opened for business today. After a year and a half of planning, owners Patrick McCredie and Peter Ringold have transformed the former Avila space and are finally serving up satay for the neighborhood. Co-owner Patrick McCredie told us, “We’re open for business as of today and we’re super excited to be a part of Wallingford.”
After you sample some wines from our Wallyhood/City Cellars tasting tonight from 5-7 p.m., you might want to consider heading across the street to Satay for a quick bite–and let us know what you think. They’ll be open until 9 p.m.
In the meantime, we sent our eyes about town reporter Helen up to sample the goods. She reports:
The pieces of chicken were moist and tender with a richly flavorful marinade. A generous pool of fresh peanut sauce, plentiful white rice and a nice, crunchy chopped cabbage side salad. Good-sized serving. The marinade had lemongrass, turmeric, cumin, coriander, shallots and garlic and they marinate the meat overnight. They use “hearty piece of meat”. It’s an authentic Malaysian recipe from his aunt whom his father’s brother met while he was in the Peace Corps as a young man (Merrill, the dad told me this story).
The Dessert Roti was a flaky, light, moist, crispy confection with sweet condensed milk, cinnamon and sugar drizzled on top. Not heavy at all. So delicious!
Peter says their approach is to have “a limited menu with a few well, honed recipes”. It took them a whole year to develop the satay recipe. Also they roast their own peanuts for the peanut sauce (he showed me a bag of red-skinned peanuts) instead of using peanut butter like most places.
She also reports that the memory card on her camera isn’t working, so she can’t share the pictures she took with us. Instead, we’re showing you a picture of satay from Vancouver taken by Monica Arellano-Ongpin. Close enough.
Satay is open 11:30 a.m. till 9 p.m. Monday through Saturday.
I had the chicken and tofu satay today. Tasty with a bit of spice, but not too much. The peanut sauce was excellent! Everyone was nice and they all seemed excited to be open. I’ll definitely be back to try more things on the menu.